One of the earliest hydrofoil accounts is credited to Thomas Moy, an English engineer who in 1861 installed a set on a boat in the Surrey Canal and noted that when the vessel was towed, it was lifted βquite out of the waterβ. William Meacham explained the foiling principal and described his own experiments in a March 1906 edition of Scientific American magazine. That same year in Italy, Enrico Forlanini is seen racing his hydrofoil craft across Lake Maggiore.
Alexander Graham Bell undoubtedly read Meachamβs article. By 1906, Bell was using floats on some tetrahedral kite experiments for trials over water at Beinn Bhreagh. Alexander Famous for inventing the telephone, he also developed the first successful hydrofoil, which he called the “hydrodrome.” He conceived of the “heavier than water craft” in 1906. Bell, along with his wife, Mabel Bell, and colleague Frederick W. BALDWIN, began developing it in 1908 at Baddeck, NS.
Bell’s first hydrofoil, the HD-1, achieved foiling speeds of 72 km/h in 1911 and 80 km/h in 1912. The HD-2 broke up. The HD-3 was built in 1913 but a moratorium was imposed on hydrofoil development by WWI. The HD-4 set a speed record of 114 km/h in 1919, when the world’s fastest steamships travelled at only 48 km/h.
A film made in 1920 in Cape Breton recorded the first prototype of a hydro foil boat as it roared across the surface of the Bras d’Or Lake in Baddeck, N.S. It’s said Alexander Graham Bell tested the hydrofoiling boat, named HD-4, which was powered by two airplane engines.
According to the video, which is posted on the National Geographic Societyβs YouTube page, the HD-4 hit speeds of up to 71 miles per hour on the surface of the water. It was designed and built at the Bell Boatyard on Bell’s Beinn Bhreagh estate near Baddeck, Nova Scotia. In 1919, it set a world marine speed record of 70.86 miles per hour (114.04 km/h).
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